[ameya.malondkar]

I am working on Project : Pendrive Linux which is booting and running linux from pendrive. I have succeeded it getting a basic working root filesystem with busybox. Next i wish to install X server and planning to use xfce as my desktop. i am not able to figure out whether to xfree86 binaries or source. and how to start withthis.
Can anybody help me out with this

[i92guboj]

Originally Posted by ameya.malondkar

I am working on Project : Pendrive Linux which is booting and running linux from pendrive. I have succeeded it getting a basic working root filesystem with busybox. Next i wish to install X server and planning to use xfce as my desktop. i am not able to figure out whether to xfree86 binaries or source. and how to start withthis.
Can anybody help me out with this

Well, did you build the basic system using source or pre-built binary packages?

If you are doing something portable, your best approach would be the source way, because that way you can discard lot's of dependencies at compile time by compiling only the options you really need. I'd look at the LFS guides for that. Another option is to use Gentoo and build a custom stage4

[ameya.malondkar]

I am building system from source. I m reluctant to refer LFS guides because they dont fit in my pendrive. I have to build entire system within 128 MB. Isnt there any way other than LFS?

[i92guboj]

Originally Posted by ameya.malondkar

I am building system from source. I m reluctant to refer LFS guides because they dont fit in my pendrive. I have to build entire system within 128 MB. Isnt there any way other than LFS?

I assume you are using a bigger drive to build all the stuff, and then you copy the resulting binaries to your pen drive.

It's very hard to strip down the lfs basic installation if you really want a functional os, but it's not impossible.

There are some things you can look into:

-use busybox instead of the tipical linux tools, that'll save some space

-use a 2.4 kernel to save a bit more... though this might not be an option if you need support for recent hardware

-compile using -Os when possible, that will make your binaries smaller, some packages might break with anything other than -O2, though

-look into sqashfs to host the bootable image, that will allow you to include a lot more of stuff because it's a compressed read only filesystem

-you can look into uclib vs. glibc. A tipical linux system uses glibc, but uclib is much smaller, making it interesting for some applications. They try to retain compatibility with glibc as far as possible, but I don't know the kind of problems you can find when using it as a substitute for glibc though...

http://www.uclibc.org/downloads/Glib...ifferences.txt

I know that it should be possible because I still have a knoppix mini-livecd that fits in a small cd on about 200 megabytes or so, and it shipped with kde 3.5 or something like that. So, it must be possible to strip it a bit more.

If I can think of anything more that could help, I will post again.